Some are saying it’s quite alright because the budget isn’t being destroyed by this overtime, but couldn’t you effectively (even with benefits factored in) hire a least one more policeman for this amount?
I have no experience scheduling emergency personnel, but is this a smart policy when dealing with budgeting and scheduling emergency personnel like policeman, or does some administrator have their head up their ass?
Do some deputies work too much?
If the administration is willing to pay, I don’t see Miner shouldn’t take advantage. Maybe he really really loves being a cop. For the administration, it might not be as effective to hire additional deputies, who have to be trained from scratch and then dumped when deputies currently on military leave return.
The other thing is that salary is only a fraction of the total expense of each officer. Let’s say you need 440 manhours of work each week and let’s say each officer gets $20 an hour regular time and $30 an hour overtime. You could hire ten officers and have them each work four hours of overtime each week - so you have ten officers officers each earning $800 regular pay and $120 overtime pay, for a total of $9200 in salary each week. Or you could have eleven officers, each working a forty hour week with no overtime - a total of $8800 in salary each week. The choice seems obvious.
But you forgot the benefits. Each officer has a health plan that requires the department to pay $500 a week for each officer on its payroll. So ten officers cost $5000 a week and eleven officers cost $5500 a week. If you combine the salary and health plan expenses, you see that ten officers cost $14200 a week and eleven officers cost $14300 a week. Ten officers is actually a savings.
Except that the real rates are more like $30 and $50. So one cop gets $1200 per week 11 get $13,200 and 10 with overtime get $14,000.
Well, the obvious question is whether he’s getting enough rest and is alert and healthy for the job. If the answer is yes, then it seems to be working out well enough for both sides.
The problem I see here is the “padding” of salary towards calculation of retirement benefits. Locally, the police pension rate is based on salary earned in last year of service, so county police departments have been known to load up the overtime hours on upcoming retirees to increase their pension. The overtime money earned is counted as salary. So if the officer in question were in my jurisdiction, and was up for retirement, he just tripled his pension rate.
Legal, yes.
Unethical, I believe so.
Other jurisdictions may follow this formula as well.
$180,000? A mere bag of shells. Port Authority Officer Rober Fabiszak worked 3,737 hours of overtime in 2002 to get his final year’s salary up to $280,000.00.
Well, I’m not a cop but I do work for the government. And my salary is something like 60% of the total amount the government pays for me. So if the government is paying and additional $.67 for every 1.00 they pay me in salary, it makes economic sense for them .50 extra to me before paying an extra $.67 for a new employee.
We can’t do this. By law, we can collect all the overtime the government wants to pay us for if the work’s available. But for pension purposes, anything over 10% above our base salary doesn’t count for pension purposes.
From an HR perspective, it may or may not be smart policy and depends on the factso of the individual situation. There are 3 key areas of facts to look at: Is the work still being done at an acceptable quality? Is there an increased risk to the health/life of the employee? Is it more expensive than hiring an additional employee, considering all the facts including training, pension and severance if you have to let the other one go? There may also be union contract requirements related to OT and/or the hiring of new employees. If there are, those actually take precedence over the 3 areas above.
From a gut feeling perspective, this seems very far on the high end to be an effective use of overtime, but it would be up to King County’s HR folks to run the real numbers.
The New York State Pension system works as follows for retiring personnel. (Police and Fire. I am not familiar with other systems).
Your yearly salary, excluding over time is the basis for the following. Two years from retirement, you are allowed to make 12% more than the previous year. One year from retirement, you are allowed to make 20% over the 12% year.
Pension is half of your final year.
You can pull in a ton of overtime money in your final two years, but the percentage numbers are what your final pension is based on.